Babylon Steel (49 page)

“Laney.
Laney.
”

She looked at me, through burning tears.

“No curses. I know. I know you want to, and I want to let you, but it isn’t ours to punish them, and not here, where no-one can see. They’ve got away with too much in secret. It’s time to take it out into the sun.”

We roped the ex-Avatars together.

Flower carried Previous.

T
HE PRECINCT WAS
ankle-deep in stinking water; the Rohin had flooded. Priests and civilians, their worship disturbed, were huddled on the steps of the temples. Wreaths and bedraggled dead chickens floated in the muddy mess. We were surrounded by muttering and stares as we herded the ex-Avatars out through Babaska’s temple into the sun.

“Look,” Unusual said. “What is that?”

Something in the skyline above the precinct walls had changed; the statues had a strange, furred look, dotted with flecks of colour.

I realised something was growing on them. Some kind of creeping vine.

People were looking, gathering around us as though drawn by some instinct. I stood on the steps, blinking in the sunlight, wondering what to do now.

One of Hap-Canae’s sun-priests splashed towards us, holding his robes above his knees. “That temple is forbidden,” he said, obviously grasping for something he could control, unlike the river. “Worship of the Traitress is... who
are
you?”

“We are your Avatars!” Aka-Tete roared, or tried to; his voice was cracked and thin. “Kill this woman! Release us!”

The sun-priest blinked. “Avatars? You’re not Avatars! You speak heresy!”

I could feel the crew looking at each other. “Get ready to run for it,” I muttered in Lithan. “This could get nasty.” I turned to the sun-priest. “No, they’re not Avatars anymore, but they were,” I said. “And me... I was once the Avatar of Babaska.”

“What? No.” The sun-priest looked from me, to my crew, to the roped Avatars, and obviously wasn’t sure who to accuse of what. “Heresy!” he said, to the general air.

There was silence, the lap of water; a baby wailed suddenly and was hushed.

“Speak,” someone called.

“Yes, let’s hear it.”

“Let her speak!” I could see those who called out; they all bore the jawline mark. How many of them were there?

“Silence!” The sun-priest roared. “They are heretics! Guards!” He motioned to the temple guards who were scattered about. They moved towards us as fast as the water would allow, raising their spears.

There was a swirl of movement in the crowd, and suddenly, somehow, there were people standing between us and the guards.

Many bore the jawline mark. Some of them were obviously courtesans, and a good few were, even more obviously, soldiers, with battered weapons in their hands. They looked at those shiny, unused spears, and grinned.

Temple guard wasn’t a post for those with brains, but it wasn’t a post for the suicidal, either. The guards halted.

“Listen to her!” A young man with henna in his hair and a smudged kohl-mark on his jaw raised his hands towards me. “It’s the truth of Babaska! The Human Goddess, she speaks! Listen to her!”

“Wait!” I yelled. “I’m no goddess, I never was! None of them are, that’s the
point!
”

A tall woman in worn blue robes looked up at me, and smiled. “We know,” she said. “We believe the Truth of Babaska, that the Avatars are human.”

“Heresy!” came the roar, from priests and priestesses.

“No, it isn’t,” I roared back. “
This
is what you’ve worshipped. Recognise them? They’ve gorged on stolen power while the land crumbled and people died. You know what they did with that power. You
saw.
Now their power’s gone, and this is what you’re left with.”

“Gone where?” The sun-priest scoffed.

“Here! Look!” A man stumbled towards us, his arms full of bright objects. It took me a moment to realise they were gourds, fat and ripe, yellow and green and orange. “The statues are covered with them! There’s food, food everywhere!”

Some of the crowd broke and ran, then, to grab what they could. I didn’t blame them.

“This is the bounty of the gods!” the sun-priest shouted. I almost had to admire his quick-footedness. “See how they favour us! Worship the gods who give you bounty, bow before their Avatars... these are not Avatars! These are some poor slaves this woman has captured to tempt you into heresy!”

“Silence!” Shakanti surged forward, stopped only by the rope at her waist, glaring. “I am Shakanti! Look on me! Am I not beautiful? Do you not fear me and adore me?”

The priest looked at her, her bald wrinkled head, the shrivelled breasts and sunken ribcage clearly visible through the silvery gauze of her gown, then looked away in obvious embarrassment. “Oh, let the poor creature go,” he said. “It’s obvious she’s mad. You should be ashamed.”

Shakanti shrieked with rage, and tried to claw for his face, but couldn’t reach.

The other Avatars began to find their voices, then.

“I am Aka-Tete! I am terror, and night!”

“I am Meisheté! I hold your children in my hand!”

They cawed like ragged crows at autumn’s end, condemning themselves.

“I am Hap-Canae!” How could that harsh rasp be the voice that had once wrapped me like silk? “The power was given to us by the gods! We had more in our grasp – we could have made this a land of glories!”

“We don’t want glories!” A man with battered armour and one arm yelled back. “We want enough to eat, and a decent life! That’s what we want!”

The crowd roared agreement; I felt it bearing me up, like the sea.

“Kill ’em! Kill the Avatars!”

“Kill them! Kill them, kill their priests!”

It would be so easy to let that sea wash over me. I wanted them dead, with a bitter fury, and if a few priests died, too, well, hadn’t they had a hand in it? Hadn’t they lived fat in the Avatars’ shadow?

Tiresana’s own moon was hanging in the air, full; a pale ghost, just above the horizon.

You and me, Chief, we take responsibility for our actions, don’t we?

“Wait!” I held up my hand. Thank the All, they quieted. “I know what they’ve done,” I said. “I was part of it, for a while. For my stupidity, and my cowardice, I am profoundly sorry. Now, you have the right to decide what’s done with them” – I took a breath – “and with me, if you so wish.” Keeping my eyes on the crowd, I gestured to the crew, “Not these, though. They’re friends, who came to help me end it. And they’ve paid. Paid more than these monsters were ever worth.” I swallowed down grief. Later, if I lived, I’d grieve.

The crowd shifted and muttered. The priests were looking nervous, seeing the reins of power jerked out of their hands and the beasts ready to bolt. The Avatars were beginning, at last, to look frightened. I took a hard breath. “Listen,” I said to the crowd. “If you decide they should die, that’s your privilege. I couldn’t blame you. But a very wise and brave young woman recently said to me: ‘I must believe that people can choose to do what is right.’ So can you? Will you be like the Avatars, or can you be better?”

The silence stretched out deep and long; I could hear my ears humming. I began to realise I was so bone-tired that I was in danger of collapsing and rolling down the steps into the mud.

The floodwater was draining away.

The one-armed soldier spat. “Better than that lot? S’hardly a challenge, is it?”

There were some mutterings of disappointment, but more cheers.

“And me?” I said.

The blue-robed woman looked at me with tears in her eyes. “
You?
We’d never hurt you. You’re our hope.”

A shudder twisted right up my spine. “No!” I said. “I’m not. Nobody should be. You’ve got to be your own.”

The sun-priest said, “What... but what will we do? We have to keep things in order, we have to...”

“Who gave you that right?”

The sun-priest looked at the Avatars. Then he closed his mouth.

“The gods are gone,” I said. “The Avatars are gone. The people are right here.”

T
HEY TRIED TO
get me to stay, both the heretics (Babaskans, they called themselves) and the priests. They seemed to think I still had a job to do, but I wasn’t having it. I just wanted to get my crew, what was left of them, home. But there were a couple of things that needed doing.

I went to the room of sarcophagi, alone, and said goodbye. I arranged for a stele to be set up, out in the sun, with the girls’ names on it. No-one knew the names of the other Avatars of Babaska, so I told them to carve a sword and lotus on it.

Reversed.

Then I asked after Sesh and Kyrl. None of the priests would meet my eye. “Sesh of the house of Lothi and Kyrl Danashta?” The blue-robed woman looked at me, and her face told me everything, even before she spoke. “They spoke of Babaska’s Truth,” she said, gently. “They were the first. The Avatars... I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I hadn’t really expected that they’d still be alive, but still, it hurt. And yet they’d been at my side in the shape of those Babaskans, standing in the muddy precinct, demanding to hear the truth.

And before Sesh and Kyrl, of course,
we
had begun it. More than twenty years ago.

Oh, Ranay. It did work, in the end. I wish...

I looked at the priests.

“Make another stele. Put their names on it. Sesh of the house of Lothi; Kyrl Danashta;Ranay, Priest of the Temple of Babaska. Good people have died,” I said. “They’d better have died for something worthwhile. Screw this up, and I
will
come back, and I will personally take each one of you to hell. Believe me, I know the way.”

They were leading the ex-Avatars away, as we left.

“Wait!” Hap-Canae called to me. “How can you leave me? I was your god!”

“That was then.”

“Babaska,” he said.

“
Don’t call me that.
” Before I thought, my hand shot out. The crack of it meeting his face seemed incredibly loud. “It’s not my name. No more than Hap-Canae is yours. Do you remember who you really are? I do. I’m Babylon. Babylon Steel, Ebi that was. And you – you’re no-one.”

I turned my back on him, and gestured to my crew, and we gathered up our dead and walked away.

A
S THE TEMPLE
precinct fell behind us, with the sound of laughter and chatter and shrieking children, and the smell of cook fires and sweet squash roasting, I seemed to move in a bubble of silence, in which names buzzed and fluttered against my memory like moths around a lamp. Sesh, Kyrl. Ranay. Previous. Jonat and Renavir. So many deaths. Even Hap-Canae, who might as well be dead; I’d loved him, once, more than my own soul, and if I hadn’t been such a fool, how many of those deaths could I have prevented?

It wasn’t until I heard someone gasp, and had to look up, that I realised my vision was thick with tears.

“What is it?” I said, hastily rubbing my eyes clear.

“Look,” Flower said. “Don’t cry, Babylon. Just look.”

I looked, blinked, and looked again, and realised that creeping across the baked curves of the desert was a faint, tender flush of green.

W
E GOT BACK
slightly more slowly, and easily enough; the syzygy was still in effect. I was leaning on the rail of the boat, on the river between Loth and Galent, when Laney came up beside me. “How’s the wrist?” She’d bandaged it before we left.

“All right.”

“You’re brooding,” she said.

I shrugged.

“Previous was a soldier, Babylon. Fighting’s what she did. She died with friends, you know. Lots of people don’t get that much.”

“Yeah.” We’d brought her back with us. She had no family I knew of. We’d bury her in the garden. It seemed fitting.

“Babylon, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Well, two things. You became one of them, didn’t you? At the end. You changed.”

“Yes. I had to. I... only an Avatar could use the ring.”

Laney nodded. “I thought so.” I waited for her to ask more questions, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer, but she seemed satisfied.

“I’m still not sure,” she said, “why you didn’t kill the Avatars. Just
some
of them. Not just because of Previous. Because of what they’d done to
you
.” She glanced at me, and sighed. “But then vengeance isn’t as important to you as it is to Fey, is it?”

“They’re mortal,” I said. “They’re going to be ordinary, and sick, and old. They’re going to spend years knowing they’re just those things, and that death is coming for them. They’ll never be able to be normal, to just appreciate a warm bed or a good meal. Not after what they’ve had, and what they were. Seems like vengeance to me.”

She looked thoughtful, and then smiled; a cool, Fey smile. “Here,” she said.

In her hand was the false ring. Sword and lotus, carved in a red stone. “I didn’t know if you’d want it, but I didn’t like to just throw it overboard.”

I took it from her and held it up. It wasn’t an object of power; it wasn’t even gold. But it was still a perfectly good ring, and my finger had felt naked without its original.

I slipped it on. Laney, watching, sniffed a little. “Poor old Frithlit.”

“He was false, too.”

She looked at the ring. “That looks better on you than on me, doesn’t it?”

“Big, loud, cheap – yeah, it’s definitely more me.”

She poked me in the side. “But not false, Babylon. Never false.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Day 13

Twomoon Ending

T
HERE WAS A
lot waiting for us when we got back. Twomoon was fading, and the client list was backed up halfway to next week. It didn’t help that my wrist was still bound up, but I didn’t let Laney do much to it. It felt right to let it heal naturally.

We held the burial first. We patted the cold earth over her; there’d be a headstone, later. In the meantime each of us said what words we felt were best, the things we remembered about her, the things we wished we’d known. It was another bright, frosty day, but somehow it felt as though it should have been raining.